'Scary Hand' Make-Up and Effects

In the bathroom scene where the 'demons' hand touches Laura's shoulder, we had to make the hand looking scary and gruesome to give the effect of 'death' and make it look scary. If we didn't do this, it would just look like a normal hand and it wouldn't look very scary at all. 

To make Faye's hand look like this we used 3 things, tomato ketchup, dirt and baby powder. 

We wanted to use tomato ketchup to give the effect that the hand was covered in blood. We thought this would be a good thing to use because we found that fake blood was extremely bright red and we didn't think this looked realistic. Tomato ketchup is quite a dark browny type of red and we thought this resembled the colour of real blood more than using a fake blood so we decided to use this instead.

We then wanted the hand to look really pale. When people die, they go really white and cold because the blood is no longer pumping around their body. We wanted to make the 'demon' look pale and give a sort of 'cold' and 'dead' effect to make it look more creepy. We decided to use baby powder for this because it's white and so we felt it was the best thing to use. We looked at using white paint for this but, like red paint, it's extremely white and doesn't really give the 'pale' effect that we were looking for.

And finally, we wanted to make the hand look dirty, as if it had almost 'come out from the ground' and so decided to add dirt to it. This made Faye's hand look really creepy and more effective. We then added water to Faye's hand afterwards because we knew that when you add water to baby powder, it goes quite clumpy. We thought this would look gruesome and almost look like the 'demons' skin was shedding.

The finished make up is pictured below:

After we'd finished the make up and filmed the shot, we needed to add effects onto Faye's hand to increase the spookiness even more and make the scene more intense for the audience.

We changed the exposure of the shot, decreasing the highlights slightly so it became more dark to look more horror like and scary. We also decreased the shadows, this made sure that it didn't highlight any parts of the shot and just made it all the same darkness which we thought was more professional.

Finally, we added the effect 'Prism' to our shot. This effect basically made Faye's hand look like there was a double and had a sort of shadowy effect on the hand. It also shadowed parts of the hand and made them look slightly out of focus. We thought this looked really good as it gave off a sort of ghostly feel to the shot which is what we wanted the 'demon' to be portrayed as. We also thought it looked better rather than having no effect at all because that may have looked boring and less scary. Below is the outcome of adding 'Prism' to this shot.